Lennie and the Machine

Something very bad happened - not last week but the week before. We just couldn't bring ourselves to write about it or have it included in our blog... I’m going to tell you about it now though, a week later...

To recap, and for those who don’t know, we are living completely off-grid. Our “general” water supply is rainwater collected from the static caravan roof and it is unfiltered. For drinking and cooking water, we fill up various bottles and water containers at the village tap. We have propane gas bottles and the gas supplies an oven, a fire and a water heater. The electricity is complicated...

We have 3 different sources of power - a wee petrol generator that lives underneath the caravan which is started with a pull chord and runs at 94Db (so it’s quite loud!). We have the electric car and the “Chinese Machine” (more on that later!) and we have a solar panel with two marine batteries - similar to what you’d find in a yacht. Each of these systems has a different use and they all have some limitations. The table below explains what we use them for. If you are already bored, skip on to the next paragraph - bizarrely this is the interesting stuff for me!

So as you can see from the table, the most important source of power for us is Lennie and the “machine”. The machine works by communicating with the software in the Nissan Leaf and somehow it negotiates with the car to reverse the charging port to "give" instead of "receive" power. Nissan do not underwrite the machine so the whole thing was a big gamble. I imported it from China and it cost me over £3k! As far as I know, there are only 2 of them in the UK. Up until last week it has been brilliant though and we have really depended on it. Because it is “talking” to the car, it has a shutdown procedure that you have to follow.

Unfortunately 10 days ago, while in a slightly inebriated state, I switched off the system without shutting it down. The following day I discovered to my horror that the car had gone into “emergency” mode, also known to the Nissan Leaf community as “Turtle” mode whereby it would only go 25mph and demanded to be taken back to the Nissan dealer immediately. On speaking to the garage, this was confirmed as our only course of action - having the car towed to the mainland and to a Nissan dealership for repair. ARG!!! I was raging at my stupidity (internally of course) and Julia was very glad it was not her who had committed the dastardly crime! I was pretty confident that the car was ok and that it was a software problem so I tried all sorts of resets and remedies. I tried disconnecting the 12V battery for 10 minutes (yes - electric cars also have a normal 12V car battery!) but nothing cleared the faults. After a lot of googling and visits to various Leaf owner chatrooms (globally), I discovered an app called “Leafspy Pro” which, via a dongle you plug into a port in the car, can “speak” to the car’s computer. I ordered said dongle and bought the app (£20). After “uming” and “awing” for a further 2 days, I used the App to read and then reset all the errors codes and … IT WORKED !!! So we now have a revived Lennie and the machine is still working. Makes it much easier to share this news now it’s fixed!! Phew!!

The "before" error log and the "after" error log...

The other bit of housekeeping this week was the replacement of a broken water pump in the caravan. I very much doubt it will be the last one either but I have got a couple of spares if needed - they cost about £30. It’s all fine now but I did waste half a day on that too.

So what about the project?! Well, we have pretty much finished the shed structure. The roller door frame was the last bit to go up. We now have to clad it which we will start as soon as the wind/rain permits. We have been scuppered a few time this week with rain. We cannot use the power tools in the rain and you can't do anything much on the shed without them so we have lost quite a lot of time.

One of the "hangovers" from the incorrect anchor bolt locations (see earlier blog) was that one of the replacement bolts hit rebar and consequently was a much shallower than it should be. So I used one of the "lost souls" and made another cleat from an off-cut of the steel to doubly secure the column from the other side... this shed is going nowhere!

We have had a couple of nice exploring walks this week (sorry no photos) and it has been very sociable. We tried the new cafe on Friday night. It was pizza and pasta night and they have a proper pizza oven so we were not disappointed. It is great to have two eateries on the island now. We went to the pub for a couple of pints after the pizzas which was also very sociable.

We also received out first mainland visitor yesterday. Sarah dropped in for a cuppa. She is here for the whole week, staying in a cottage and there are other pals (mostly Julia’s pals!) coming on Tuesday. It is Julia’s birthday on Wednesday so weather permitting we will have a wee gathering on the beach. Sarah is coming for supper tomorrow night so I’ve got to catch a fish before high tide at 8:30 ... no pressure!! ...

Last night we went for dinner at our neighbours house (Mike and Liz) which was really nice. They had invited another couple and Liz made a fantastic array of asian dishes which were all absolutely delicious. What a wonderful Saturday night and how lucky we are to have such great neighbours.

Regarding the house foundations it has not been a good week. We have been “wobbling” about the suitability of the ground for the concrete footings for a while and this came to a head when John and Alison dropped in this week. John said he thought the ground was too soft and that led us to get 2 more opinions on the matter. The conclusion is that we are going to dig deeper - a lot deeper until we reach something more solid - like Bedrock! We might not have to do this but the word "might" carries a lot of sway... On Thursday, Ben and I went round all the footing walls with a pinch bar - sinking it into the ground as deep as we could every meter or so. Ben did the grafting while I wrote down the findings :-) … the good news is that we hit something solid almost everywhere within about a meter from the surface. Hopefully it is all bedrock and not some random stones but we will soon find out as tomorrow I’m going to get digging again. If things go well, we will reveal bedrock everywhere and back fill it with packed type 1 until we are close to the current ground level and from there we will will lay the concrete footings. It’s slightly annoying and a lot more work but nothing like the problems we would face if we had a subsidence issue after building the house! Hey ho!

The pinch bar holes...

The red numbers are the mm below surface where the pinch bar hit something solid...

We did put some more drains into the ground this week - along the side of the house. We did this in preparation for the deeper digging. You wouldn’t know though because we dug the ground, installed the drains and then buried them again. Unfortunately I did take out one of the house marker posts with the digger - a bit of a bummer. Seems that I’ve made a lot of mistakes of late… :-( On the positive, we will have to remeasure the lines anyway because we have changed the foundation structure and the house is a massive 7mm shorter than it was!

We have done a lot of planning and procurement for the next stage of the build this week too but that is not really very interesting for the blog...

Lastly, Julia's tatties are starting to look promising...

So that is our (main) news ... sorry it is a bit techie and boring... never mind, Julia's blog is only a week away...

Keep well and have fun!